Imbolc Maiden Moon
Diana Bass has written a book, Grounded, about what she believes is a revolution in religious thought. God’s no longer in the Holy Elevator business, press 2 for heaven, B for hell. No, God’s moved out of the three story universe and climbed into the world around you. Immanence, not transcendence. Bass finds God at the sea shore, in the clouds (no, not up there, the real clouds), in movements for social justice, in human relationships.
She seems very excited about all this, certain that a major inflection in Christian history has begun to unfold on her watch.
Here’s the problem I have with it. What does adding the word God to an experience of natural sublimity add? If God is found in human relationships, as Henry Nelson Wieman famously thought, again, what does adding the word GOD to a human relationship contribute?
I agree with Bass about the direction of what she and others call religious thought and practice. But I don’t believe an immanent God makes more sense, probably less in some ways, than the old boy with the beard in the sky where you go when you die. If you’re lucky.
Instead of moving the entirety of Christian history out of the heavenly and into the soil and peoples of this very mundane earth, why not imagine that a reenchantment of the world is well under way. That giant sucking sound you heard for the last 2,000 years or so was the Christian faith draining the spirit from nature, from human interactions and locating it in a transcendent realm. Sort of vampiric, taking the life force from the earth and its living beings and storing it far away in the care of one despotic ruler.
Well, it’s time to give it back. That’s what’s going on right now and the movement is not aided by reinterpreting the very theological systems that created the problem in the first place.
